From the acidified and plasticized oceans to the greenhouse gas-polluted atmosphere to the radioactive and heavy metal-contaminated soils, the Anthropocene Epoch will leave behind a planet radically altered in its atmospheric and biospheric chemistry. This disruption, unprecedented in geologic time for its rapidity and wide-scale destruction, is already too severe for the complex web of life that had evolved under earth’s previous life-sustaining homeostatic system. As Brian Moss (et al.) wrote in Climate Change Impacts on Freshwater Ecosystems, “The chemistry of the biosphere is the ultimate sine qua non of our existence.”:

It is expected that we will have lost over half the world’s land ecosystems to agriculture or development by 2050. The urbanites may not be noticing this but the consequences will nonetheless be huge, for it is these natural ecosystems that regulate the nature of the biosphere. We have absolutely no idea how much of them can be damaged without serious consequences for human survival. All we know is that such systems, honed by the utterly ruthless mechanisms of natural selection to be as near fit for purpose as possible, are just as crucial to us, indeed much more fundamentally so, than the local grocer, filling station or hospital. The chemistry of the biosphere is the ultimate sine qua non of our existence. …in contemplating the hitherto effects of climate change, we fail to realize that the loss of ecosystems and the changing climate are linked. Indeed we blithely cost the damage of climate change (Stern 2006) as we cost the goods and services we are losing through the application of the same approach of classical economics. We have failed to see the interaction of climate, ecology, and equability. Our attempts to mitigate climate change, in a desperate bid to avoid disruption of our societies, may inevitably be doomed to failure unless we begin to see the whole picture and not just the components we find most convenient to our cash economy. – Link

Man-made climate change is the number one driver of the 6th mass extinction currently unfolding. Without bees, the grocery shelves look rather bare. Without coral reefs, the oceans are devoid of most life. Perhaps the greatest blind spot of humans is their inability to imagine that earth does not need them. The myopic, anthropocentric worldview that humans “own the earth” is emblematic of our economic system and its principles, and this belief that everything can be valued in dollars and cents will prove to be our undoing.

Modern man evolved in an environment composed of carbon dioxide(CO2) levels averaging 240ppm and methane(CH4) levels averaging 700ppb. Today’s atmosphere is now filled with nearly double the amount of CO2 and triple the CH4. A third greenhouse gas worth noting is nitrous oxide(N2O) which has 296 times the ‘Global Warming Potential’ (GWP) of CO2 and a lifespan of 150 years. N2O’s pre-industrial levels were around 270ppb, but are now at around 330ppb and climbing 0.3% per year. When all greenhouse gases are combined, the world is at a carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) of 479 ppm. And we’re locked into much more warming due to the carbon-based civilization we have built. Global dimming and the lag time of climate change have hidden the full effects yet to come, but the changes we are already seeing at only 0.85°C are catastrophic. If you are unaware of the runaway feedback loops causing the Arctic to warm twice as fast as the rest of the planet and the exponential ice melt happening in both of the Earth’s poles, then you haven’t been paying close enough attention. David Spratt elucidates some of the tipping points we have already breached:

…tipping points that have been passed thus far, at less than 1°C of warming:

The loss of the Amundsen Sea West Antarctic glaciers, and 1–4 metres of sea level rise (Rignot, Mouginot et al., 2014; Joughin, Smith et al., 2014). Dr Malte Meinshausen, advisor to the German government and one of the architects of the IPCC’s Representative Concentration Pathways, calls the evidence published this year of “unstoppable” (Rignot, 2014) deglaciation in West Antarctica “a game changer”, and a “tipping point that none of us thought would pass so quickly”, noting now we are “committed already to a change in coastlines that is unprecedented for us humans” (Breakthrough, 2014).

The loss of Arctic sea-ice in summer (Duarte, Lenton et al., 2012; Maslowski, Kinney et al., 2012), which will hasten regional warming, the mobilization of frozen carbon stores, and the deglaciation of Greenland.

Numerous ecosystems, which are already severely degraded or in the process of being lost, including the Arctic (Wolf, 2010). In the Arctic, the rate of climate change is now faster than ecosystems can adapt to naturally, and the fate of many Arctic marine ecosystems is clearly connected to that of the sea ice (Duarte, Lenton et al., 2012). In May 2008, Dr Neil Hamilton, who was then director of Arctic programmes for WWF, told a stunned audience (of which I was a member) at the Academy of Science in Canberra that WWF was not trying to preserve the Arctic ecosystem because “it was no longer possible to do so.”

Such environmental changes are imperceptible to the real-time cognitive processing of humans, but in geological ‘deep time’ these events are cataclysmic and portend a dire future for humans. As Jared Diamond described in his writings, climate change is the ultimate under-the-radar threat able to undermine human reasoning and response:

Psychological concepts of how we view the world around us, including ‘creeping normalcy’ or ‘landscape amnesia’, block day-to-day comprehension of what accelerating human activities represent—whether it is human population, the number of dammed rivers, forest destruction, or the impact of motor car emissions in a timespan that is geologically brief. Creeping normalcy refers to slow trends concealed in noisy fluctuations that people get used to without comment, while landscape amnesia describes forgetting how different the landscape looked 20–50 years ago (Diamond 2005: 425).

In his study of how societies fail, biogeographer Jared Diamond calls global warming a pre-eminent example of a ‘slow trend concealed by wide up and down fluctuations’ (2005: 425). He likens the denial of climate change impacts by leading politicians, including former US president George W. Bush (and his contemporary John Howard in Australia), in the late 1990s and early 2000s to the elite of ‘the medieval Greenlanders [who] had similar difficulties recognizing that their climate was gradually becoming colder, and the Maya and Anasazi (in Central and North America) [who] had trouble discerning that theirs was becoming drier’ (2005: 425). – Link

Nate Hagens recently made a comment online which is key to understanding much of the frustration, obstinacy, and mass delusion that modern society exhibits when trying to understand one piece of the global crisis rather than taking a holistic approach:

“I think 95%+ of environmentalists don’t integrate systems, energy or human behavior into their analysis of our climate predicament and think we can just plug and play BTUs (British Thermal Units) and have low carbon economic growth – PCI (Post Carbon Institute) has spent most of the last 5 years trying to educate [the public] on this front, to little avail.”

Most energy experts know that “renewable energy” will never be able to replace energy-dense fossil fuels at the global scale (Just for oil, it’s 90 million barrels consumed every day and forecast to hit 96 million BPD by 2019), but they don’t take into full consideration the collapse of earth’s stable Holocene climate which has allowed industrial civilization to flourish. On the other side of the coin, most climate scientists and activists I have encountered do not understand the sever limitations of “renewable energy”, yet many are well aware of the looming disaster posed by anthropogenic climate disruption. Trying to fully comprehend the multiple interconnected global crisis bearing down on industrial civilization is like the allegory of the six blind men and an elephant. Unable to see the bigger picture, each man argues and maintains that their limited view of reality is the only correct one.

As global coal consumption continues its upwards march, the real outcome of the Lima climate conference is that humans are more than willing to hide behind contractual jargon and kick the can down the road rather than come to terms with the unsustainable nature of industrial civilization:

The shift of a single word—from a “shall” to a “may”—means the world will very likely continue to burn lots of coal. Instead of being required to provide “quantifiable information” about their greenhouse-gas emissions, countries may choose whether or not to include those statistics in their pledges instead, known in the jargon as “intended nationally determined contributions. – Link

After more than two decades of climate talks, are we to believe that industrial civilization will ever reform itself for the sake of a living planet? As pervasive as self-deception is in modern society, the reinsurance industry is one sector of industrial civilization unable to turn a blind eye to the rising costs of increasingly extreme and chaotic weather events. The U.S. military is another entity impelled to acknowledge anthropogenic climate disruption, whether it be responding to the wreckage from monster typhoons in the Philippines or the destabilizing effects of droughts in the Middle East. After a few centuries of burning fossil fuels and the accumulation of vast amounts of climate science data, techno-capitalist carbon man is also being forced to react to the fact that the earth’s atmosphere is not an infinite pollution sink for his endless consumption of energy. The problem is that several planetary tipping points have already been irreversibly transgressed, threatening the very habitability of earth. Our predictable collective response is to try to techno-fix the problem rather than entertain any fundamental rethink of the pillars of the capitalist economic system and the scientific reductionism that have led us to this impasse. As evidenced by the number of articles published in mainstream periodicals these days about geoengineering the atmosphere, awareness appears to be growing amongst the business elite that things are starting to spiral out of control:

Geoengineering is another problem-solving strategy that our complex society will employ in order to try to solve the ever-complicated problems arising from ecological overshoot. In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter described this process of developing progressively more sophisticated technologies to solve problems. Geoengineering is wrought with dangers and even frightens many of those scientists who are working on such schemes, but it may be our last hope of saving ourselves from abrupt climate change and a hothouse Earth similar to past rapid warmings. Recent research has shown that the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a time in earth’s history when global temperatures rose upwards of 5°C in the space of about 13 years, serves as a better case study for modern climate change than previously thought:

About 55.5 million years ago, a burst of carbon dioxide raised Earth’s temperature 5°C to 8°C, which had major impacts on numerous species of plants and wildlife. Scientists analyzing ancient soil samples now say a previous burst of the greenhouse gas preceded this event, known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), and probably triggered it. Moreover, they believe humans are pumping similar levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere right now, raising concerns that our own emissions may also destabilize Earth’s climate, triggering the planet to emit devastating bursts of carbon in the future.

The paper implies that even if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide right now, our descendants might still face huge temperature rises, says paleoclimatologist Gabriel Bowen of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, the lead author of the new research. “It is a possibility,” he says, “and it’s a scary one.”…

…The researchers used climate models to investigate how the initial, smaller heating could have triggered the later surge in temperature. They estimate that the first thermal pulse is likely to have warmed Earth’s atmosphere by 2°C to 3°C, but that the atmospheric temperature would have gradually returned to normal as the heat was absorbed into the deep ocean. However, when that heat finally reached the ocean floor, it might have melted methane ices called clathrates, releasing the methane into the ocean and allowing it to make its way into the atmosphere.As a greenhouse gas, methane is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide [up to several hundred times the Global Warming Potential of CO2 for the first two decades before decaying into CO2], so a sudden spike in methane emissions could lead to huge climate change. – Link

If we are only going to use geoengineering techniques to try to keep business-as-usual afloat, then such efforts will be nothing more than the last gasps of a dying civilization, but if these technologies are coupled with an expedited wartime transformation of our society, culture, economy, and political institutions into a very low or zero carbon society, then perhaps such efforts would be worthwhile and could save our species from extinction. However, I see no signs of any such transition towards a decentralized, simplified society, and more noteworthy, neither does Tainter. We are firmly locked within the complexity trap:

…‘the study of social complexity does not yield optimistic results’ (Tainter, 2006: 99). In fact, there is something deeply tragic in Tainter’s view, because it suggests that civilisation, by its very nature, gets locked into a process of mandatory growth in complexity that eventually becomes unsupportable. Furthermore, history provides a disturbingly consistent empirical basis for this tragic view (Tainter, 1988), leading Tainter (2006: 100) to conclude that ‘all solutions to the problem of complexity are temporary.’ This seemingly innocuous statement is actually extremely dark, for it implies that ultimately and inevitably social complexity will outgrow its available energy supply. – Link

As things stand right now, not only must we stop the rise of CO2, but we must also halt the loss of Arctic ice albedo and implement methods for pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere because a 2°C warming limit is a thing of the past. Sound advice would be to stop digging when in catastrophic overshoot, but it does not appear we can stop because the system is in control, not us.

“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That’s what’s at stake, isn’t it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

About xraymike79

I'm a social critic, political/cultural commentator and artist. The modern industrial world is on the cusp of great changes to our current unsustainable way of life. Most people are oblivious to the paradigm shift that will occur, but some are starting to awaken to the fact that the future will not resemble the halcyon days of the last half century in America as evidenced by the OWS movement. My objective is to highlight important news stories and find the truth that is hidden behind what Joe Bageant called the American Hologram.
www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

Post navigation

71 thoughts on “Locked-Up Inside the Complexity Trap”

Here in Pennsylvania, we had a new “liberal” governor elected, Tom Wolf. He decided to not ban fracking in Pennsylvania as it is bad for our economy. My local news station interviewed people of Bradford county and asked what they think of upstate New York’s ban on fracking, and since they’re brainwashed by the sustainable fracking bullshit ever so popular in my state, they’re all for pushed and taxed fracking because it is beneficial to the economy. As you’ve stated multiple times, most people are oblivious to the cataclysm approaching. Local travesties such as fracking are only on a small scale of things. But the only people who seem to be aware of its dangers and consequences are the people who live on or near fracking sites.

I vote in hopes to get someone better than Tom Corbett in office, and I’m hoping Wolf’s environmental policies will improve.

Great video. I’ve talked to people about climate change and the fate of the human race when it relates to such a topic. I asked one of my old idiot co workers about what he thinks of climate change and he simply stated that by the time we see the effects, we’ll all be dead. He also said how much he loves children and wants the best for them, yet doesn’t consider the consequences our actions will have on future generations. This goes to show how much our species doesn’t think about the future inhabitants of the planet.

Ya but I already posted the link with the old title on another site. Do you have any idea what this is going to do to my reputation? I’m ruined!…………… I’ve always wanted to say that.

Someone should start a new drinking game where you have to chug a pint every time it gets reported that a climate model under-estimated something.

“Existing computer models may be severely underestimating the risk to Greenland’s ice sheet — which would add 20 feet to sea levels if it all melted — from warming temperatures, according to two studies released Monday.”

A truly superlative presentation. You’re really drilling down to the cancer at the heart of it all: Industrial civilisation.

This focuses more precisely on the big picture. Most people seem to be committing themselves to concern over one or two “issues“, which is akin to putting bandages on the head of someone with a brain tumour.

These things are all just symptoms of the lethal disease afflicting the human species, Earth and all the Life it harbours: Industrial Civilisation.

From “Endgame”, by Derrick Jensen, excerpts from “The Twenty Premises”

PREMISE SIX: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

PREMISE SEVEN: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier the crash will be, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.

“Human beings will be happier – not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.”
Kurt Vonnegut

Even if we do return to a primitive society, we will soon start the process of building unsustainable growth again because we are just a bunch of glorified ants and it’s in our DNA to expand. Hopefully I am wrong.

The human species, if all its know ancestors are considered, has managed to survive for some five or six million years. It persisted and evolved, until around fifteen to ten thousand years ago, in unimaginably hostile environments, assailed by predators and beleaguered by massive natural disasters.

After enduring these trials for thousands of millennia, as an integral part of the natural world, Homo sapiens, suddenly and very recently in geological time, deliberately abandoned its almost incredibly successful evolutionary path and embarked upon a journey that has brought us to the brink of extinction in a mere ten thousand years.

For whatever reason, the human species committed a colossal evolutionary blunder. We call it “The Neolithic Revolution“. Humans invented sedentary agriculture and became “civilised”. They shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it.(source)

It seems that humans are best adapted to Life in small groups with a maximum of no more than 150 members. Personally I think even 150 are too many.

For most of human evolution the laws of Nature set the limits to growth, as, inevitably, they always will. Humans did not – could not – push against those limits to any significant degree prior to the Neolithic “revolution” and the onset of the disease we have come to think of as civilisation.

It was the abandonment of the forager/gatherer/hunter “culture” that lead to the spawning of this “civilisation” and, ultimately, to our current unsustainable and irredeemable culture of domination. It’s my humble opinion that humans stopped evolving around 10 – 15 thousand years ago.

Creating large stationary population centers, which probably began with the construction of monolithic structures for practicing group “rituals“, enabled the development of patriarchal hierarchies, which allowed the pathological minority to gain “personal” power, eventually becoming dominant over the “social power” of the majority. It was the social power of small, tribal, forager cultures that kept the essential psychopaths – the Kunlangeta – in check for hundreds of thousands of years.

Essential psychopaths make up no more than around 1% of any given population and they are male by a wide majority. When a tribe or “society” consists of a very small number of individuals it’s quite likely there will be no sociopaths present. If there are, they will stand out like the proverbial “sore thumb”, making them easy to eliminate.

Once civilisation began to “industrialise” – and sedentary farming was a primary impetus for industrialisation – it became, ipso facto, expansionistic, like a cancer. With that growth, for the first time, it became possible for the pathological to hide in the resultant hierarchies, seek each other out – both skills at which they excel – form cliques and cabals and rise to power.

Capitalism, economics, militarism, classism, global warming/climate change and all the myriad “issues” confronting us today are merely symptoms of a disease – our much vaunted civilisation – which will, if not stopped very soon, result in its own collapse at the very least, mass ecocide and, possibly, even near-term human extinction.

As long as pathological psychoses are part of the human condition, it will be impossible to build a real civilisation. Until then, functional societies or cultures wherein populations can exceed 150 as the extreme maximum – and even that many is pushing it – will simply be a nice idea with no hope of realisation.

Just my opinion

“Human beings will be happier – not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.”
Kurt Vonnegut

Interesting no one is proposing to do one or more experiments along these lines to discover what might work best socially….especially those critical of industrial civ/capitalism…communicating directly to one another and preparing to actually do it together and perhaps give the rest of humanity some incentive to change and live differently.

We live in an atomized, ‘consumer culture’ society where few even know their next-door neighbors very well. This is not conducive to communal living. We killed off all the tribes for this alienation. Moving away from it now will requite decades of upheaval and social reorganization.

When a society is forced to adapt to psychopathic domination, which exactly defines our modern “civilisation”, most people, blinded by indoctrination, normalcy bias, denial and willful ignorance, will accept the pathological nature of the system as “normal” and make every effort to conform to it.

Or so my research into and study of Ponerology has led me to conclude.

“Definition: pathocracy (n). A system of government created by a small pathological minority that takes control over a society of normal people” (from Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, by Andrew Lobaczewski)

Pathocracy from Greek pathos, “feeling, pain, suffering”; and kratos, “rule”
“A totalitarian form of government in which absolute political power is held by psychopathic elite and their effect on the people is such that the entire society is ruled and motivated by purely pathological values.
A pathocracy can take many forms and can insinuate itself covertly into any seemingly just system or ideology. As such it can masquerade under the guise of a democracy or theocracy as well as more openly oppressive regimes.”

If any such “experiments” as you suggest were attempted and showed any signs of success, if they offered any hint of threat to the status quo, they would be first marginalised by the mass media, then, if that didn’t stop them, ridiculed and discredited with a campaign of disinformation. If all else failed, they would simply be declared “illegal” or acts of “terrorism” and crushed violently and publicly.

The train won’t stop until it runs out of track. Anthropocene Mass Extinction will most likely end with our own species. Ironic that the makers bring about their own destruction. Fuck humanity because we’re fucked – the sine qua non of ‘civilized’ humans.

There are so many unavoidable systemic flaws to industrial civilisation that I think anyone who understands them realizes that there is no way we can avoid a collapse.
We can’t even get off first base. We had a former Australian treasurer, who introduced a baby bonus here to encourage people to breed like rabbits, gravely assuring the population of the importance of encouraging a high economic growth rate, when he was interviewed yesterday.
Just to highlight one aspect of our civilisation which has been constructed around the fossil fuel treasure trove: If we include energy inputs for transportation, the countries relying on industrial agriculture to feed themselves, consume around ten energy units of fossil fuels for each energy unit of food consumed. No doubt most here know this, but still worth contemplating.
Well done again, Mike.

“There are so many unavoidable systemic flaws to industrial civilisation that I think anyone who understands them realizes that there is no way we can avoid a collapse“.

Well said and absolutely correct.

Now, what about this?

We find ourselves balanced on a precipice and at the bottom is a different world. Looking over the edge we can see it’s a long way down. If we take another step like the ones that have brought us here, we will plunge uncontrollably to a catastrophic crash into the unknown so far below.

Or:

We can stop here at the edge, acknowledge the reality of the situation, gather our resources, pool our knowledge and, working together, but only in small groups, for the common good of not only humanity but all Life on Earth, and intentionally begin a carefully calculated, rational and controlled descent into a new, deindustrialised, low-tech, Nature and reality based culture.

Keep in mind, we know without doubt that we’re going over the edge one way or the other. If we are the rational creatures we so smugly pronounce ourselves to be, which alternative do we select?

From “Endgame” by Derrick Jensen, excerpts from “The Twenty Premises”

PREMISE SIX: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

PREMISE SEVEN: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier the crash will be, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after. (emphasis added)

Don’t let whatever I type prevent you from making any efforts you want to make to implement solutions. The vignette about our former treasurer was just an example of what seems to me to be unsolvable problems. Our civilisation is too large, it’s institutions exist in a reality of their own creation which doesn’t align with the biophysical reality of our planet. Efforts to change those institutions have come to naught, and our population is now too large, the climate situation is deteriorating too rapidly, etc, to alter the trajectory now.

“…our population is now too large,the climate situation is deteriorating too rapidly ,etc, to alter the trajectory now.”

You’re probably right. It’s most likely too late. Nevertheless, it couldn’t hurt to begin preparing our children and grandchildren to live as foragers. That will really be the only option for most of the “survivors“.

However it ends, the sooner it happens the better for anyone and anything that makes it through.

Guy McPherson has been warning about this for years and time is running out fast. You can read his blog Nature Bats Last at guy.mcpherson.com where you can read his climate change essay or here his new radio show Nature Bats Last on prn.fmhttp://guymcpherson.com/recent-video/

Thanks for this excellent article Mike – to put it in perspective, I have long argued that nuclear weapons talks, climate change talks and financial reform talks must be integrated as one, and the full ramifications of this on the structure of the nation state and today’s political structures must be considered. Instead the process that we have today is that all these are discussed and negotiated separately. The inherent interconnections between these mean that they must all simultaneously succeed and keep on succeeding year after year. The chance of this happening works out at about 6E-63, which is considerably less than selecting a given atom at random from all the atoms that make our planet. So total failure is all that can be realistically expected.

This takes us to where we are at – today we have run out of options. As you say, technology controls us, not the other way round, and the most controlling of all is nuclear weapons technology. Even as we stare ecological collapse in the face, all the nuclear weapons states and more are in the game for massive economy busting expenditure to upgrade their nuclear arsenals. The irony is that these will outlast the civilisations that they are supposed to be protecting.

We are now moving towards the ultimate nightmare of uncontrollable nuclear weapons proliferation and runaway climate change. As these come together, it gets harder to see how total war can be avoided. The end may be an awful lot quicker and dirtier than we are accustomed to think as the logic of nuclear deterrence and the balance of terror collapses in the face of inevitable death from climate change.

today’s thinks — the amazonian drought and russian heat wave were the same year.

here’s my amazon book review:

This Changes Nothing
by Nairobi Klein
I was having a dump the other day, when looked down in the bowl, i saw an auto-morphic fecal face that was the poopleganger of myself staring back at me, I knew in my heart that capitalistic turd was me.

some scary stuff I made up for truth out today:

Corn uses more water,and is more susceptible to heat and drought, than any other crop. If it gets too hot, it will not pollinate. If the Russian heat wave of 2010 happened over the U.S., the whole world would go hungry. Every degree of temperature rise will raise moisture in the air by 8%, leading to more extreme weather. What are we doing?
► We put bacteria DNA directly into plant DNA and eat it, putting new RNA inside us.
► We put brand new, man-made, computer designed, synthetic DNA into our food.
► We put nano metals and particles in our food so small they fly through our cell walls.
► We put pesticides and herbicides directly into individual food cells and eat it.
► There are thousands of different chemicals in our foods washing out our guts.
► We are eating stuff that never existed on earth before, turning us into mutants.
► OUR FOOD IS KILLING US AND ALL LIFE ON EARTH.
► 10,000 years ago, humans and livestock were 0.01% of land vertebrate biomass.
► Humans and livestock are now 97% of land vertebrate biomass.
► We both eat nearly 50% of land chlorophyll biomass production each year.
► 1,000,000 humans, net, are added to earth every 4½ days.
► We are eating all of earth’s food, leaving nothing for the wildlife.
► 50% of vertebrate species died off in the last 50 years.
► 50% of remaining vertebrate species will die off in the next 40 years.
► +50% = Unstoppable Irreversible Catastrophic Cascading Extinctions Collapse.
► 75% Species Loss = Mass Extinction.
► Ocean acidification doubles by 2050, triples by 2100. This will kill ocean food.
► World Bank says we have 5-10 years before we all fight for food and water.
► 97% of Tigers gone since 1914.
► 90% of Big Ocean Fish gone since 1950.
► 90% of Lions gone since 1993.
► 90% of Monarch Butterflies gone since 1995.
► 75% of River & Riverbank Species gone since 1970. 75,000 dams block U.S. rivers.
► 50% of Great Barrier Reef gone since 1985.
► 50% of Human Sperm Counts gone since 1950.
► 50% of Fresh Water Fish gone since 1987.
► 40% of Giraffes gone since 2000.
► 30% of Marine Birds gone since 1995.
► 28% of Land Animals gone since 1970.
► 28% of All Marine Animals gone since 1970.
► 93 Elephants killed every single day.
► 2-3 Rhinos killed every single day.
► Bees die from malnutrition lacking bio-diverse pollen sources making colonies more susceptible to disease and poisoning.
► 200 years ago, there used to be more Green Sea Turtles, by weight, in the Caribbean Sea than there were Buffalo on the great plains, both species are now almost gone. There are more Siberian Tigers in zoos than in the wild.
► 200 years ago, there used to be so many Passenger Pigeons that the mid-day sun would be totally blocked out when huge flocks of them flew by. Passenger Pigeons have been extinct for 100 years now. We used to feed them to our dogs, they were so cheap. Humans and dogs don’t live long enough to notice these things much.

We are just getting started. Soon, earth will enter a planetary state shift and will be unable to provide basic ecological services for us like breathing and eating. Sorry for spoiling your meal, I just thought, maybe, you should know what is going on and what we are really doing. But, don’t listen to me, I never graduated high school.

Robert, I’m sure you must know that you are preaching to the converted on this site. Have you ever tried reddit; r/collapse, r/dark futurology/ r/environment? I bet you would not last 1 day posting at the Techno Utopian r/futurology. One whiff of negativity towards any technology and they pile on. They are a young crowd over there (30 and under) and their social conditioning shows. The amount of label hanging of mental health conditions on others is telling of their demographic. It’s how they saw authority deal with “problem” kids growing up.

From its inception, capitalism paved a one-way path to annihilation, predicated as it was on unmitigated growth, the extraction of finite resources, the exaltation of individualism over communal ties, and the maximization of profit at the expense of the environment and society. The capitalist world was, as one author described so bleakly, ”dominated by the concerns of trade and Realpolitik rather than by human rights and spreading democracy”; it was a ”civilization influenced by the impersonal, bottom-line values of the corporations.” Capitalist industrial civilization was built on burning the organic remains of ancient organisms, but at the cost of destroying the stable climatic conditions which supported its very construction. The thirst for fossil fuels by our globalized, high-energy economy spurred increased technological development to extract the more difficult-to-reach reserves, but this frantic grasp for what was left only served to hasten the malignant transformation of Earth into an alien world.

…Many NGOs are angry over what they see as a lack of progress. A frustrated Sam Smith of the World Wildlife Fund said that “the text went from weak to weaker to weakest, and it’s very weak indeed.”…

…NGOs warned the plan was not nearly strong enough to limit warming to the internationally agreed limit of 2C (2 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels. Already more than 7 million people, mostly in developing countries, are dying prematurely each year from air pollution, closely coupled to climate change…

…The South had been hoping to receive $10 billion a year from the North for 10 years for a total of $100 billion, but the commitment was removed from the table in Peru.

The new Peru document says only that wealthy nations will help developing countries fight climate change by investing in energy technology or offering climate aid.

Twenty or 30 years ago, the United States and European countries likely would have been willing to provide several billions a year to poor countries, but now practically every so-called rich country is broke. The United States has committed the largest amount, but only $3 billion…

…Northern countries reiterated in Peru they expect the South’s major emitters to begin cutting back on carbon emissions. But this is unlikely to happen any time soon. China and India, the two biggest polluters in the South, say they will need to burn millions of tons of coal in the coming years so they can develop their economies.

The public interest group Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) says that powerful multinational corporations played a big role in making sure that the conference did not meet the expectations of many people present. They say that companies and their lobby organizations convinced Western governments that if stronger emission controls were introduced, many thousands of jobs would be lost.

To the shock of many participants, Shell Oil was permitted to speak at the main session about its preferred way of fighting carbon emissions – carbon capture and storage (CCS), a still unproven technology. Another oil giant, Chevron, was permitted to sponsor side events inside the negotiations.

No wonder the energy giants want to block emission regulations. A well-researched study released in September 2013 found that just 50 corporations were responsible for 73 percent of the greenhouse gas emitted by the world’s 500 largest companies. Of the carbon-polluting corporations, the most egregious offenders were within the energy sector, and, as a whole, these companies were doing little to change their ways…

…Eighty-two NGOs and one international NGO were accredited as observers at the conference. The various drafts of the agreement were negotiated in secret, and any party making a statement was kept to three minutes.

NGOs had so little status in Lima that they had to get approval from the UN for the slogans placed on their protest banners. Neither countries nor corporations were allowed to be named on the banners. A march by 10,000 protesters had no impact on the proceedings…

…Another problem is that mainstream US media, instead of seeking out the truth about the dangers of carbon emissions, has confused the public by publishing articles expressing both points of view. But in Europe, where climate change is a bigger issue, The Guardian newspaper refuses to carry climate change denial material.

A Gallup poll earlier this year showed that only 24 percent of Americans are worried a great deal about climate change. Twenty-five percent were worried a fair amount. And 51 percent were worried only a little or not at all.

The weaknesses of the US protest movement means there is not nearly enough public pressure on the government to make it move…

The only serious protesting we will see, will be for pie. It could be as soon as the spring if the shale bubble pop kick starts the mass layoffs and austerity. 40 plus years of ever increasing debt; it’s been quite a run. Hey Mom? can I crash in the basement? You know, just till the economy “recovers” and I get back on my feet.

How many people in Pompeii decided to get out before the inevitable happened? We still have natural volcanoes and new artificial ones (see nuclear energy). No, the shit will hit the fan first. The rest is just hot air. I enjoy sites like these because of the like-minded folks. But it’s all an exercise in impotence.

I wonder how many slaves were forced to stay in Pompeii and Herculaneum to look after the holdings and villas while the masters went on timely vacations once the rumblings became louder. They knew the danger was there; it had happened before. They were drawn there by that rich volcanic soil that grows such wonderful things and makes a man prosper. That’s why people still live around active volcanoes today. Think of those poor farmers around Mt Pinatubo in 1991. Like modern fossil fuel man the source of their wealth was their undoing. Like the peoples who inhabit those volcanic areas we know what will eventual happen, but carry on under the illusion that it won’t happen in my life time. Gots ta get paid.

We already have social collapse. AS for “shall” & “may”: may implies permission, so the word is might, which implies possibility. Look them up in an English Dictionary. Sit tight, wait it out; the dimwitted might get by for a while, but they are mentally incapable of getting it right: they shall fall.

Paul Craig Roberts Stunning 2015 Predictions – At Any Time The West Can Collapse

[link to original interview]

In this and the following article Roberts discusses how easily Russia could throw a big wrench into the western banking system, causing European and U.S. financial collapse by simply not paying the latest traunch due in early 2015. He goes on to show that the manipulation of gold prices is going to have a “backfire” effect as it cause higher demand than the amount of physical gold. Check it out.

Klein is naive on the ability of “renewables” to scale up and replace fossil fuels as well as the fact that it takes fossil fuels to make and maintain solar panels, wind turbines, and other machinary/technology, but this comment about geoengineering is insightful:

“In general the geoengineering world is populated by very overconfident, overwhelmingly male figures who don’t make me feel at all reassured that they have learned the lessons of large-scale technological failure. When I went to this one conference that was hosted by the Royal Society in England, the Fukushima disaster had just started, and in fact a photographer I was working with—a videographer—had just come back from Fukushima and was completely shell-shocked. And I was surprised it didn’t come up the whole time we were meeting, because it seemed relevant to me. Yeah, we humans screw up. BP had been two years earlier. I have been profoundly shaped as a journalist by covering the BP disaster, the derivatives failure, seeing what’s happened in Fukushima. I’m sorry, but I think the smartest guys in the room screw up a lot. And the kind of hubris that I’ve seen expressed from the ‘geo-clique,’ as they’ve been called, makes me not want to scale up the risks that we’re taking.”

“…most people know what we are doing… but if mitigating catastrophe means changing one’s behavior, then people will opt for pointless distractions (denial) like petition signing or voting for “them” to fix the problem.
…enjoy today… for these are the good old days.” ~ Todd Cory(via America2.0)

Or glorifying and dramatizing it in a new fantasy genre coined as “Cli-Fi“…

Most people only have a general idea of what we are doing and some not at all. It takes a lot of time and effort to thoroughly understand any subject; it’s work if your not compelled/obsessed by it. Most people are not willing to put in the effort. Simply ask the people you meet in your daily wanderings questions on energy, climate change, science, etc and you will mostly get simple parroting of whats featured in the MSM. For example, in that Grist piece on “Cli-Fi” the author groups Margaret Atwood with the “new” genre. Margaret Atwood was writing about all these issues before that clown was born. Accuracy and context do not matter when the majority are only functionally literate and almost completely innumerate.

That clip reminds me of a link you posted awhile back to an article comparing and contrasting Christian teaching/values with capitalistic society; oil & water.
Dr. Richard Carrier lays out a compelling case that the whole Jesus movement was based on a celestial Jesus, not a real person. There really is no evidence that such a person existed. Regardless, it is almost a certainty that Jesus will be making a big come back in the years to come along with a whole whack of other crisis cults, old and new alike. Can you imagine what it would be like in a SHTF scenario if that particular group of Christians gain real power? Woe to the atheist. Gulp!

Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues
Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said

River deltas are even better than the volcanic growing regions. They are all at sea level or only a few feet above. Just temporary flooding caused by storm surges will saturate that delta land with salt.

From the extreme to the mean: Acceleration and tipping points of coastal inundation from sea level rise

Connect with me on Twitter:

Connect with me on Tumblr:

OWS knows who really pulls the strings

"...the megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. Indeed, Occupy's best move, as conservative blogger/financier Gregory Djerejian noted at TheAtlantic.com, was "directing their ire squarely toward the real elites of the country, rather than their bought-and-paid marionettes sitting in Washington."

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm).
To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%."
- Albert Bates

Professor Rick Wolff explains why growth has become a focus of our modern political system. He describes how inequality is created by the way our enterprises are organized. Because a significant portion of our lives are at work, how would our society look if democratic businesses became the new normal? What would be the environmental and social implications […]

The Firefly Gathering offers a wide range of classes for adults and children on primitive skills, permaculture, nature connection, and eco-homesteading that are designed to be able to be applied to enhance everyday life. The gathering gathers a bevy of inspiring, amazing people. Besides classes it offers evening entertainment, basic infrastructure, and on-si […]

Australia is experiencing a rapid energy transition & is on track to reach 100% renewable energy by 2032 at approximately zero net cost! Most of the developing countries in sunbelt can follow this path too & avoid the damage to the earth's climate.

Stomach Of Dead Whale Contained 'Nothing But Nonstop Plastic'

Mount Everest: Melting glaciers expose dead bodies. Several studies show that glaciers in the Everest region, as in most parts of the Himalayas, are fast melting and thinning.

US climate policy must protect forests and communities, not the forest industry